BROCKTON – Lately, Richard Holiver has been having trouble with his hearing aids.

Holiver, a 90-year-old veteran from Holbrook, started losing his hearing a decade ago. As a soldier attached to an artillery unit during World War II, Holiver stuck close to the anti-aircraft guns.

“In those days, you were a sissy if you put anything in your ears,” he said.

Last week, Holiver sat in the office of Daniel Carusi, a hearing specialist at the Beltone Hearing Aid Center in Brockton. He ended up at Beltone after struggling to get the correct batteries for his hearing aids from the VA.

After running out of his battery supply recently, Holiver said the VA sent him the wrong batteries and then insisted they were the right ones. He also said his hearing aids were more than six years old and he was having trouble setting up an appointment for new equipment.

Despite difficulties, Holiver said he does not blame the VA, which has been saddled with an influx of young veterans and is battling a national scandal over the waiting times for appointments.

“They're doing the best they can with what they have,” he said.

At first, Beltone gave Holiver six battery packs at no charge. But after word got to Beltone executives about Holiver's 20 years of military service and his good nature, the company gave him an appointment on the house to fit a free pair of top-notch hearing aids.

“Richard touched everyone here at Beltone, and made us really think about his service and how we should take care of our veterans,” marketing coordinator Marissa Picard said. “He was so grateful for just an ear to listen and some batteries that we had to do more.”

When Holiver grabs an ear, he does not let go.

He can detail his entire Army career – from his March 25, 1943 drafting at Commonwealth Chevrolet in Boston, to the months he spent cataloguing the dead in post-war Europe – in less than 15 minutes.

He recalls shipping out to Scotland after D-Day, landing in Normandy, France, and sleeping in hedgerows until a German bombing raid “lit up the place like daylight.”

There was bumping into U.S. General George S. Patton in France, crossing the Rhine River into northern Germany, encountering the opposing army on the Autobahn, approaching the Austrian border as the war in Europe ended, and finally settling into the foothills of the Alps as word came about Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the end of the war in the Pacific.

Later, after becoming a funeral director, Holiver returned to the Army. He put in 20 years, retired, then started a series of careers.

He was a draftsman and purchasing agent for a major water treatment company, and founded his own gun store in Randolph before becoming the manager of a sporting goods shop in Watertown.